'The Walking Dead' Finale Recap: The Best Episode Since The Pilot?

"The first two acts of "The Walking Dead" Season 2 finale were full of excitement, honest to God suspense and characters who came up with pretty decent plans on the fly. When the braaaainsfinally hit the fan at Hershel Greene's farm, my pulse quickened and I found myself wondering and even caring about the survival of characters who'd done little more than irritate me for weeks."

"Hell, I even gave a crap about Hershel himself. As he pumped that rifle and mowed down walkers on his front lawn, he finally became a resolute character worth investing in," writes Maureen Ryan at the Huffington Post.

Where has this show been for the past half year?

Read more: Huffington Post

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Movie Review: The Devil Inside

[ via LA Times ] 7 Jan

For those who have a taste of watching horrifying movies, here is something that might interest them. "The Devil Inside" is the latest in the apparently endless supply of "found footage" fake documentaries that present themselves as cobbled together from the artifacts of a hapless filmmaker on an especially doomed project.

A woman confesses to a triple homicide and is eventually shipped to a hospital for the criminally insane in Rome with ties to the Vatican. (It's seemingly no big deal for an American citizen to be extradited to an Italian mental facility for a crime committed in Connecticut.) Twenty years later, the woman's daughter travels to Italy to find out if her mother is mentally ill or possessed. 

There is of course a cameraman in tow and after walking into a class for exorcists, they team up with two young priests who practice their own techniques outside the guidelines of the church......

Read full review: LA Times
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The 11 Best Films You May Have Missed In 2011

[ via Huffington Post ] by Leonard Maltin

If you're a discerning moviegoer who lives in a community with a specialty theater (or art house, as we used to call them), you may have seen some of the titles on my list. But there are some smaller, more offbeat pictures, that fly under the radar of even avid film buffs. Because they don't have major marketing budgets--or, in most cases, marquee stars--they have no presence on billboards, bus stops, magazine covers, or talk shows. Some are home-grown and some are foreign-made; many are serious but others take a lighter approach to the stories they present, saya Leonard Maltin, film critic and historian. 

Here is Maltin's list:

1. Sarah's Key
2. of Gods and Men
3. The Guard
4. Incendies
5. Higher Ground
6. Win Win
7. Submarine
8. Terri
9. City of Life and Death
10. Tucker and Dale vs Evil
11. The women on the 6th floor

Read reviews Here

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Movie review: 'The Flowers of War'

[ via LA Times ] 23 Dec

After the "Black Sun - The Nanking Massacre" that was released in 1995 on the notorious Nanking Massacre, "The Flowers of War" has broken new ground for China's movie industry: It's among the first domestically financed films to star a high-profile Hollywood actor (Christian Bale), and its reported budget of close to $100 million makes it the country's priciest production to date. But when it comes to storytelling, Zhang Yimou's 19th feature is decidedly backward-looking: A lavish period weepie set against the atrocities of the Nanking Massacre, "Flowers" abounds with well-worn movie archetypes and slathers on schmaltz.

Based on Geling Yan's novel "13 Flowers of Nanjing," the story gathers an improbable collection of people — Bale's freelance American mortician, a group of convent schoolgirls and the women from a local brothel — in the nominal refuge of a Catholic cathedral as the capital falls to Japan's Imperial Army. 

Zhang marshals his creative team to deliver stunning cinematic sequences and period detail, particularly in Yohei Taneda's production design for the church and the character-defining costumes by William Chang Suk-Ping.

Read full review at: LA Times

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